Page:Generals of the British Army.djvu/11

 equalled by the resolute skill of the command. The first battle of Ypres was the first in which the Germans and the British fought b. entrance, and no one to-day is ignorant of the result. The Germans broke off the engagement and thereby acknowledged their defeat. The British had not turned the line. That was impossible with their resources. But they had held the Germans off from their goal and inflicted upon them one of the bloodiest defeats in history.

Henceforward the war presented a different problem to the command. The last battle of the war of movements on the Western front had been fought for the time being and the war of positions held sway. In the months that followed, Britain had to build up an army commensurate with the task she had assumed. For every soldier of the pre-war army she had to find about ten, and her generals had to teach the new armies their business. The action of Neuve Chapelle showed the British army making its debut in one of those carefully-planned limited attacks against entrenched positions which have been developed, with growing experience, out of all recognition. Loos was a more ambitious venture. In it there appeared volunteer troops to astound seasoned veterans by their dash and discipline. But the lessons of Neuve Chapelle had not been perfectly digested and too much was attempted. The result, in its larger aspect, was less achievement than the promise of over- whelming success in the future. In these two battles the British commanders firmly grasped the elements of the problem that confronted them, and proved the worth of the new Armies. They were to apply this knowledge in the most mighty battle the world has seen.

It was the battle of the Somme that first revealed the true formidableness of the new British armies. The opening of this terrific campaign was pitched for the fifth month of the Verdun struggle. The offensive against modern entrenchments seemed to be in eclipse. Four months' pounding by the seried masses of the German guns and carefully arranged assaults by picked troops had failed to reach the enemy objective. The deduction that seemed inevitable was that the offensive was bound to be extremely costly and productive of little. It was in this atmosphere the Somme battle opened against positions that had been elaborated by two years of care and cunning. The course of that bitterly contested campaign re-established the offensive as a paying proposition. All